Oven Mitts

My mom has this unique knack of giving excessive amounts of practical gifts for any major holiday. For example, there was the year that all of us kids, stepkids, cousins, and random strangers received multiple first aid kits for Christmas - we were told it was one for the car and two or three for the house, depending on how big our houses were...when I reminded her that she had given me four kits and that made no sense seeing as I lived in a tiny apartment, she just sighed and said, "Oh honey, we all know how clumsy you are....you probably ought to keep one of them at work too - just in case..." Well, you gotta hand it to the woman...she knows her kids.

Anyway, my last Christmas season in Cincinnati, I spent a fair amount of time contemplating just what she would be getting me for the practical gift that year...I mean, over the past few years before that, I had built up a collection of medical supplies that most hospitals would envy. I had enough emergency flashlights, candles, water, and food to keep a small country alive, and the trunk of my car had started to look like a camping goods stockroom...she was really gonna have to think hard this year in order to come up with something new.

But see, that's the thing - never underestimate my mom. Though she had only been to my apartment three short times since I had lived there (she was allergic to cats and, well, funny that - I had cats - go figure...that wasn't intentional....), she had managed to somehow figure out that I only had one oven mitt in the entire joint. Now this was not a problem for me. I have always been one to keep the crazy schedule and it was no different in Cincinnati - I worked two jobs there and had begun taking part-time classes at UK so it wasn't all that often that I cooked a meal at home...thus, I never really gave oven mitts much thought.

Thank goodness someone in the family thinks about these things. That Christmas, I received 10, count them, TEN oven mitts (like the commandments, only tangible and from Williams-Sonoma, rather than from an angry bearded guy). What does one girl do with 10 flippin' oven mitts? And where in the holy crap was I going to keep these ten extra mitts? My cupboards and closets were already overflowing with random supplies - could another 10 mitts really fit in anywhere? At this point, I was going to start using the bathtub for storage area...

Then it hit me as I was wandering around my apartment, oven mitts in hand, looking for storage space. The answer was so simple, I couldn't believe it hadn't hit me sooner. The OVEN!! I had this wonderful gas oven that had a large drawer on the bottom and I hadn't managed to fill that drawer all the way quite yet. It was perfect. I tucked the oven mitts inside of the drawer and promptly forgot about them.

A few weeks later, I came home one night and just couldn't stop craving pizza bites - my guilty pleasure from time to time. So I reached into the freezer, got out a cookie sheet and popped some pizza bites into the oven. A few minutes later, I realized that the smell wafting out of my kitchen did not smell at all like what I was used to smelling whilst baking delectable pizza bites. And was it just me, or was it a bit cloudy inside the apartment? And why were the clouds getting thicker as I got closer to the kitchen? And, mylanta, what the hell was going on with the oven? Why was light radiating out of that drawer on the bottom? Like an idiot, I bent down and opened the drawer...and damn near singed my eyebrows and hair as the flames shot up from the burning oven mitts in the drawer. I slammed the drawer shut and began to panic. This was it, this was a full-fledged fire. Why had I taken those fire extinguishers my mom gave me for my birthday to work? Where were they when I really needed them??? The "clouds" were becoming thick and black and I was going to die, suffocated by inhaling burnt oven mitts and my cats were going to die as well....

My cats! That snapped me out of my panicky paralysis and I hearded the two of them up and shut them in my bedroom, with the windows open. Dammit, if I was going to die from smoke inhalation or third-degree burns, that was one thing, but those cats? Well, I had to save them - it's a cruel world out there - can't just leave the little guys to fend for themselves, right? So I ran back into the kitchen, and tried to figure out what to do. Now seriously, imagine how much smoke 10 oven mitts can generate - I was really struggling to breathe...to this day, I don't like to be around oven mitts because all I can think of is that acrid smell and the inability to breathe. But I grabbed a large container and filled it with water which I promptly threw at the oven. I then realized that throwing water at an oven isn't going to do me a lot of good if the flames are inside the oven so I slowly opened that oven drawer and poured water in it, bit by bit, till I had extinguished the flames.

Once the fire was out, I realized I needed to air out the apartment...and not just my unit, but the entire building. Later on that evening, my upstairs neighbor, whom I had a wee bit of a crush on, came down and asked me if I thought the aprtment building smelled like something burnt...at which point, I admitted that I had almost burned the whole damn place down with my oven mitts. His response? He just laughed. I then called my landlords, pertrified that they would give me the boot becauase really, who wants a pyromaniac for a tennant, right? Only, they just laughed once I finally told them what had happened...apparently, almost burning your house down and killing yourself and your pets in the process is kinda funny...who knew?

For the next few days, everyone at work kept telling me I smelled like burnt something or another...after two days of that, I caved in and told my co-workers what had happened - and they too laughed. It then became clear to me that I was not meant to be a firefighter because no one seemed to be taking my efforts at putting out fires and saving others from smoke inhalation very seriously. I wouldn't make a very good fireman if I was trying to put out a fire and rescue a child from a bulding and everyone around me just kept giggling, right? So at least this whole experience helped me rule out that profession....